Where Do Our Stories Spring From?
Where do the ideas for novels and short stories come from? What tiny seed of inspiration sets off a whole new direction for a story?
As I write this blog, it’s the first day of spring, something we’ve aaaaall been waiting for.
Pandemic – bleary, winter – weary, – spring is hopefully a time of rejuvenation and new beginnings for everything in our lives.
As you no doubt have had to do, I’ve been forced to curtail several of my former modes of keeping in touch with the people in my life (literally). This has resulted in long emails and texts and phone calls, something I usually hate (the phone calls, that is, bane to introverts everywhere).
The unbearable lightness of life has certainly been brought home to us all abruptly and brutally these past long months. We’ve watched incursions, mass funerals, learned of deaths of dear ones whose funerals we could not attend, know of tragedies from mental illness in our communities; it’s been a long haul.
But as every gardener knows – out of dead plants come the seeds for next spring. The forced isolation has caused an unanticipated side effect for me: it’s made me stay in place. Without the time spent travelling long distances to see loved ones, or following my usual meandering visits to local haunts, I’ve had more time to think. I realise that while time may be a construct, we still have a limited amount of it with the people we love.
As a result, I’ve been engaging with older family members and friends who are not on-line. Yep. Old School phone calls. I feel an urgency now to listen to their stories and reminiscences: the clarity that they won’t always be around. In our culture how many of us still follow the tradition of sitting down and listening to elders anymore? Is it an exaggeration to state person to person storytelling has become a lost art? The kids are never far from a heads down position on their phones. They are missing out on the interesting plots our family history contains: some POV my old aunties have told me about family members reveals so much – things that those folks from earlier generations never had time (or the nerve) to record. And this is where inspiration for writing fiction can come in. How I wish those remarkable people had been writers and kept journals. Learning about the fights, failures, love affairs and final fates of strangers in old family albums has gifted me with an even richer understanding, and maybe a bit of forgiveness, of human nature – and that must surely enrich my writing.
How appropriate after a metaphorical winter of stories, my writer’s mind has new seeds to grow and expand upon. The people from long ago in my family were not able to see what their stewardship would yield, if their dreams for a better life would bear fruit, but now I intend to give them happy endings.
